By opting for brevity at the Emmys, Merritt Wever was following a well-trodden
path

If, as Shakespeare suggests, brevity is indeed the soul of wit, then Merritt Wever’s acceptance speech upon winning Best Supporting Actress at this year’s Emmys ceremony surely qualifies her as heir to Oscar Wilde.

In a genre notorious for vapid and stupefying contributions, Miss Wever’s offering, consisting of a mere 11 words – “Thanks so much. Thank you so much. I gotta go. Bye…” – surely propelled her into the Guinness Book of Records for the shortest acceptance speech ever.

But, in fact, she barely creeps on to the podium. The silver medal is held by Joe Pesci’s five-word “It’s my privilege. Thank you” when accepting the Best Supporting Actor award for Goodfellas in 1990; but even he is nudged off the top spot by Alfred Hitchcock, whose bluff, two-word “Thank you” upon receiving the Irving Thalberg award for creative excellence at the 1968 Oscars remains the shortest example on record (his curtness was generally considered to be a terse comment on his failure to win Best Director, rather than an expression of overwhelmed delight).

Nevertheless, Miss Wever deserves praise for her succinctness, for as anyone who has ever had to sit through them will testify, a successful acceptance speech is even trickier to pull off than the award-winning performance.

The problem is in the nature of the occasion. The audience doesn’t particularly mind sharing your moment of rapture, but they are keener to get to the party afterwards, at which introductions will be made, business cards swapped, and meetings about future projects mooted. The ceremony itself is merely a necessary evil to be endured. George C Scott described such beanos as: “A two-hour meet parade, a public display with contrived suspense for economic reasons” (and to prove the point, he failed to show up to collect his Oscar for Patton in 1970).

So how best to use your 45 seconds of glory? If your speech is too short, you may seem offhand and condescending; too long, and the audience will be pouring paraffin over their heads. Political pontificating (such as Vanessa Redgrave’s at the Oscars in 1977) may grab the headlines, but could also sink your career in an industry notoriously fearful of off-screen controversy. Hubris, too, should be studiously avoided (as shown by Sally Field’s toe-curling scream of “You like me, you like me, you like me!” at the 1984 Oscars).

Not having much to say can sometimes be an advantage. The 73-year-old Jack Palance, upon winning Best Supporting Actor in City Slickers at the 1991 Oscars, took to the stage and performed a series of one-arm press-ups, a feat that not only made a point about ageism in casting, but gained him the biggest applause of the evening.

And remember that however well prepared you are, the shock of hearing your name called out can often send your brain cells into spasm. If, as some psychologists have suggested, the amount of adrenalin expended during an opening night of a theatre production is equivalent to that experienced in a minor car shunt, the trauma of finding yourself stumbling up to the podium must seem like a pile-up on the M1. No wonder actors often seem dazed and confused. Witness Kate Winslet, whose rambling example at the 2009 Golden Globes awards is still the gold standard for how to lose your bearings. Having commenced with a blathered apology to the other unsuccessful nominees – “Anne, Meryl, Kristin… oh God, who’s the other one?” – the speech descended into a series of gasps and pants more reminiscent of an antenatal class than a glitzy ceremony. If such an elegant and experienced nominee as her can make a Horlicks of it, nobody’s safe.

Gwyneth Paltrow’s contribution at the 1999 Oscars – all 365 words of it – was, if anything, worse. Her speech upon winning Best Actress for Shakespeare In Love may not have lasted as long as Hamlet, but it certainly felt like it. Having thanked everybody who had helped her in the role (plus many who hadn’t), her speech culminated in an unctuous tribute to her grandfather. “You have created a beautiful family who love you more than anything,” she gushed. If I had ever publicly said anything like that to my own grandfather he’d have told me to sit down and stop playing silly buggers.

The Brits tend to be less susceptible to the vicissitudes of awards meltdown, mainly because we never believe we’re going to get picked in the first place. Indeed, the best opening phrase of any acceptance speech surely has to be that made by Jim Broadbent, who in response to winning Best Supporting Actor at the Oscars in 2002 said simply, “Stone The Crows.”

Hitchcock had it right when he declared that the length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder. It’s a maxim as apposite for awards ceremonies as the actual picture.